The social experiment that revolutionized TV

A Feb. 24, 2009 photo of Sesame Street cast. Sesame Street's new season kicks off 40 years to the day after the first episode was broadcast. It's now the longest-running children's show in television history and holds the Guinness World Record for most Emmy Awards, with 122 to its credit.

Photograph by: Handout
, Richard Termine Sesame Street

Forty years to the day after it first revolutionized television and preschool education, Sesame Street will kick off a "star-studded" landmark season on Nov. 10 with an updated look and premiere featuring U.S. first lady Michelle Obama planting a vegetable garden with Elmo and Big Bird.

Now airing in 140 countries, the iconic status of the longest-running children's show in history has nearly eclipsed its beginnings as a groundbreaking social experiment. And after four decades of knocking down social boundaries and winning over children, parents and educators alike, Sesame Street's biggest challenge now is competing with the universe of slick children's programs that owe it their very existence.

"They actually changed the character of television," says Louise Gikow, author of Sesame Street: A Celebration — 40 Years of Life on the Street and former writer on the Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian joint production of the show. "We wouldn't have people who were willing to risk trying to create really good stuff that grown-ups could watch along with their kids without Sesame Street."

Sesame Street debuted on Nov. 10, 1969 with a "magazine" format inspired by the adult sketch-comedy show Laugh-In, mixing various short segments with "commercials" aimed at teaching letters and numbers.

"We were accused of being fast-paced and creating short attention spans in kids, (but) when you go back 40 years later to watch those early episodes, they're so slow!" laughs Carol-Lynn Parente, the show's current executive producer and the first to grow up with Sesame Street and work her way up from "shlepping tapes in the edit room."

"It's just a sign of the times."

As in any neighbourhood, some things have changed on Sesame Street over the years, while others remain comfortably familiar. Big Bird's favourite treat at Hooper's Store, a birdseed milkshake, cost 20 cents in 1969 and now rings in at $2.99, while Oscar the Grouch was a burnt orange colour in the first season before taking on his familiar green hue. Elmo, on the other hand, has been three years old for 25 years and 75-year-old puppeteer Carroll Spinney has been playing both eight-foot-two Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch — whose voice was inspired by a gruff New York cabbie — since Day 1.

"I think people recognize that Sesame Street is something bigger than creating a cute children's television program, that it really has the power to transform the way children think about themselves, the way they think about others, the way they enter school," says Shari Rosenfeld, vice-president international for Sesame Workshop, the non-profit entity that produces the show and its international spinoffs.

In the late 1960s, a non-profit educational foundation called the Carnegie Corporation commissioned a young TV producer named Joan Ganz Cooney to investigate a then-revolutionary idea: could television be used to educate?

After extensive consultations with educators, psychologists, television experts and children, Cooney produced a report that would become the blueprint for Sesame Street, envisioning a show that would teach children while holding their attention with the sleek production values of commercial television. In 1968, the non-profit Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) was created to realize the concept.

An educational advisory team was assembled to work alongside the writers, directors, actors and puppeteers, setting the bar for four decades of meticulous research and testing on what Sesame Workshop calls "the most heavily researched program in the history of television."

"Sesame Street really introduced the whole notion that you could use media towards educational impact, and that was a very revolutionary concept in 1969," says Rosenfeld.

Jim Henson, already an established puppeteer, was signed at the start to create a cast of furry characters. The show's child psychology experts at first insisted the Muppets should never appear in scenes with the human characters, to avoid confusing children about what was real. But early test screenings revealed that preschoolers were mesmerized by the Muppets, but tuned out when the humans appeared alone.

From that point on, Sesame Street was fully "integrated with humans and monsters and Grouches and Snuffleupaguses and eight-foot birds," as Parente puts it.

The name of the show was inspired by Ali Baba's magic phrase "open sesame," Gikow writes in the book, and won out over other options like The Video Classroom and 1-2-3 Avenue B, despite concerns that young children might have a hard time pronouncing it.

Most children's shows at the time took place in stylized imaginary realms, so setting Sesame Street in a gritty, inner-city neighbourhood was a groundbreaking choice that reflected the show's mission to provide preschoolers from inner-city and low-income households with the same educational leg-up as their middle-class peers. Young audiences saw their own world reflected in the brownstone buildings, concrete stoops and battered garbage cans of Sesame Street, and in the unprecedented racial diversity of its human cast. That diversity also got the show banished from the airwaves in Mississippi in 1970.

"In the late 1960s, there were only two shows where you could see a multiracial cast: there was Sesame Street and there was Star Trek," says Matthew Johnson, a media education specialist with the Ottawa-based Media Awareness Network. "The really courageous choices Sesame Street made were in the first 10 or 20 years of its production: the multicultural, multiracial cast wasn't something that was introduced when America was ready for it; it was introduced at a time when it was a very unusual thing to see."

Within a year of the premiere, Big Bird appeared on the cover of Time magazine in an issue christening Sesame Street "TV's gift to children." The show garnered a Peabody Award, a Grammy for its first cast album — eight more would follow over the years — and three Emmy Awards in its first season. Sesame Street now holds the Guinness Record for most Emmy wins by a TV series, with 122.

Together, the residents of Sesame Street have celebrated marriages, births and adoptions, hosted four first ladies and more than 400 other celebrity visitors and spawned more than two-dozen international spinoffs. Kermit has hosted The Tonight Show, Big Bird has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Elmo has testified before Congress on the importance of music education for children.

The Sesame Street gang has grappled with death and helped each other through a hurricane. They comforted a frightened Elmo after he witnessed a fire, at the same time his young fans were trying to understand 9/11. In September, a prime-time special for parents and children entitled Families Stand Together: Feeling Secure in Tough Times marked the first time the show directly addressed economic worries.

"The human actors, the characters themselves, the writers — they've created a place where people want to be and they still want to be there, it hasn't changed much over the years," says Gikow. "We've gone to different places in it, but that really hasn't changed. It's still a place you're happy to visit."

Now, the show is reinventing itself in a bid to stay fresh and retain a media-savvy young audience in what has become a crowded children's TV landscape. Season 40 features a science and environment theme, 3-D computer-generated animation segments and a flashy new title and credit sequence — but Parente says in many ways, the preschool curriculum of ABCs and 123s will be exactly the same on Tuesday as it was four decades ago.

"We just couldn't be happier and prouder with the way it's all come together. From the minute you turn on that first day of Season 40, you will see a brand-new show, but all the heart and essence of Sesame Street is still intact," she says. "That's part of the beauty of Sesame Street, that it's evolved over those 40 years. I think that's why it's still around."

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A Feb. 24, 2009 photo of Sesame Street cast. Sesame Street's new season kicks off 40 years to the day after the first episode was broadcast. It's now the longest-running children's show in television history and holds the Guinness World Record for most Emmy Awards, with 122 to its credit.

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